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Stability is the name of the game right now in equity markets – something that can be seen in the daily moves in various speculative sectors and how investors react to outside influences like Russia and Ukraine (really, the primary factor motivating the more wild ups and downs in the stock market at this point). Signs that the tensions may be thawing – and we’ve seen this movie before – contributed to a rebound in the Nasdaq and other indexes later in the day to leave the tech-heavy index basically unchanged on the session.

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Lots of stocks have been getting killed in the last several weeks and the declines don’t seem really like they’re set to abate headed into a week where news is again at a premium (sure, earnings, but it’s just a few names, and they’re mostly decidedly not in this category of the momentum names that fueled the rally in 2013). So the likes of Facebook, Tesla Motors, Netflix, Alexion Pharmaceuticals, and a bunch of others have seen their fortunes turn in the market. But at this time we thought it would be a good way to get into this topic again by trying to lay out just what the hell a momentum stock is in the first place, because they exhibit a number of characteristics beyond just “a stock that’s going up very high.” So here goes:

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The shift in the stock market away from momentum names and toward value is encouraging at least in some sense because it points to an ongoing appetite for equities rather than a reduction in interest there. However, one has to add the caveat that the Federal Reserve is still very much a part of this market, even as it diminishes its footprint.

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The most interesting developing trend in the U.S. equity market has been the recent stumble in the biotech and momentum-oriented names, be it Gilead Sciences, Biogen, Netflix or a few others. The biotechs were a group often cited as having entered a “parabolic” stage, which in market parlance refers basically to “going up and up and up in a straight line.” The move wasn’t anything on the order of the homebuilders during the housing bubble of 2006 to 2007, or the tech giants during the latter stages of the tech run – a 300 percent gain versus 700 to 800 percent gains back in the other cases. That doesn’t mean we won’t see an ongoing breakdown, though some of the selling abated late in the Monday session.